How Rogers Corporation
Uses Search to Drive a
Better User Experience

Situation

Rogers Corporation needed a search solution that could handle extensive product offerings to deliver relevant results for its customers and their design challenges.

Solution

By analyzing their search insights, they were able to identify five distinct personas. These personas help guide the decisions Rogers makes on its website and search.

Impact

The Rogers team can now anticipate where people are going through search, and why, when researching products on their site. 

A leader in innovation

Rogers Corporation (Rogers) is Rogers Compresseda global engineered materials company and a leader in delivering innovative solutions to solve customer material challenges. Rogers empowers the world’s leading innovators through design collaboration, application expertise and materials manufacturing to help its customers achieve greater reliability, efficiency and performance. Based in Chandler, Arizona, Rogers operates manufacturing facilities in North America, Europe and Asia and supports sales offices worldwide.

Finding an enhanced search

Rogers’ website is one of the primary tools customers use to find specific materials suitable for a wide range of applications and product designs. Rogers’ customers have needs that vary widely from industry to industry, so the company understands the importance of delivering accurate results for a positive user experience.

Search is really critical for people doing specific material research,” says Mike Brodeur, Senior Web Software Developer at Rogers. “We needed an enhanced search to make it more relevant to our customers.”

Creating a better user experience

Since implementing Cludo in 2017, the Rogers web team analyzed search insights to craft a better digital experience for customers. This started with reviewing ineffective searches and understanding how to optimize results to best meet searchers’ needs.

“It is just so critical to be able to see what people are looking for and why they’re not selecting any of the results,” tells Mike. “And then asking, ‘how can we do better at getting them relevant results?’”

Being a product-heavy website, Rogers’ site searchers are very specific, sometimes down to the exact product number. If users include any typos or terms not listed on the search page, Mike and the team rely on Cludo to make sure customers can still find what they are looking for.

Cludo is built on AI and uses machine learning to adjust results based on search behavior to maintain relevant results. The team have been able to leverage the tools within Cludo to further refine the user experience.

An example of this can be seen in one Rogers’ products called ‘R/bak.’ It often gets misspelled in the search bar, even if searchers know what they are looking for. Rogers observed the various ways it was being typed and used the Misspellings feature in Cludo to direct searchers to the right results.

Similarly, Rogers makes materials used primarily within the aerospace and defense industries on items like satellites, so most searchers have very specific needs for the products. The Rogers web team realized the product pages’ terminology wasn’t aligning with the search terms used to get there. To help connect the searches to the right pages, they were able to add Synonyms to guide users to results that better fit what they were looking for.

“This all comes back to the user experience and the user experience when people use the search. They expect the search to be effective in some way, shape, or form, to help them find what they’re looking for,” says Mike.

Rogers-1

Rogers Corporation’s Cludo dashboard with Banners, Misspellings, and Synonyms tools enabled

Aligning to search personas

Through understanding its customers, Rogers has identified five distinct personas. These personas help guide the decisions Rogers makes on its website and search. Rogers offers interactive tools to funnel new material to these personas based on their specific needs, such as material color and thickness or requirement such as fire retardancy.

By deploying Banners, the Rogers team can highlight these tools at the top of the search results. If a visitor searches for a specific product, such as BISCO® silicones, the results are listed but the banner also promotes their interactive tool. These types of banners resulted in almost a 50% clickthrough rate.

“We saw a huge amount of activity and were actually really surprised to see the power of banners,” says Mike. “So, one of the things we did was look at very specific personas and added banners like RoHS certifications and PSI certifications.”

Rogers-2

Search results for BISCO with banner on Rogers Corporation website

Rogers added Banners for product guides that coincide with the search terms. By doing so, they guarantee searchers find pertinent information they may not have even realized they needed or was on the site.

Benefits of relevancy

By implementing an intelligent search solution, the web team has been able to deliver relevant results to the various audiences Rogers serves. They have also benefited from the actionable insights of their personas. The Rogers team can anticipate where people are going through search, and why, when researching products on their site. With Cludo, they’ve been able to:

  • Provide content to multiple audiences with different goals
  • Discover which searches are going wrong and aren’t delivering
  • Guide those users to their desired content through easy-to-use tools
  • Deliver an enhanced user experience

“I really encourage people to think about search in this way, and the line is from the movie Fools Rush In: ‘You are everything I never knew I always wanted.’ That’s something I try and put in the head of the people using my search,” says Mike. “You might think you know what you’re looking for, but we also want to show you additional information that will help solve your design challenge.”

To hear more about the Rogers Corporation story from Mike Brodeur and the importance of relevancy, watch the Improving Site Search Relevancy for 2023 webinar.